Search engines exist to make information accessible. Among the kinds of information promulgated by search engines is advertising. The display of advertisements (“ads”) is often mediated by a bidding system—an advertiser bids on a keyword, and the placement of his ad on the search result page for that keyword depends on, possibly among other factors, his bid. Often, the click-through rate on the ad is a function of its placement.
It is in an advertiser's interest to know about as many relevant keywords as possible. Manually generating keywords for a domain is a difficult, labor intensive task—for a given topic there can be many keywords. Additionally, the linguistic behavior associated with search is not entirely like any other, and thus may be difficult to intuit. Accordingly, an automated method for generating search keywords for a merchant (or for a domain, or an industry, or a vertical, or a product, etc.) is valuable. It is also valuable to know how well a keyword will serve its purpose in order to bid optimally, both for merchants manually compiling a bidding strategy and for those using mathematical optimization techniques.